Digital Transformation Insights

Matt Stone

Recent Posts

From the tsunami of Pokémon Go, which made augmented reality mainstream overnight, to the explosion of chatbots taking orders for brands, large and small — 2016 proved to be more exciting and disruptive than the year before.

With the integration of digital technology into every aspect of business, digital transformation has become the key strategic thrust for most CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs. The global investment in digital transformation is expected to reach $2.2 trillion in 2019, almost 60% more than in 2016.

Financial services companies must put personalization technologies at the heart of their customer engagement and digital strategies to deliver the richer and more personalized digital banking experiences that customer want – and deserve.

Everyone wants to get the omnichannel customer experience right. That includes the right availability, performance, and scalability too. But earlier this year, the Panama Papers data breach taught us something crucial: Failing to secure that digital experience for your consumers can result in something much worse than Twitter shame. You could be looking at reputation damage, proprietary data loss, financial loss, and lawsuits.

Customer loyalty strategies are core to highly successful omnichannel experiences — those that don't just deliver against baseline customer expectations but proactively build value and loyalty into every facet of the complex, modern customer journey.

Omnichannel personalization is key to winning intent-rich moments in the customer journey and cultivating brand loyalty.

In a channel-hopping, brand-shifting economy, customer loyalty is the direct outcome of a deep, thoughtful customer experience strategy. Retailers that truly personalize and contextualize offers to individuals can drive more than2 times improvement in customer loyalty, according to IDC. Personalization technologies make lasting customer loyalty possible through unique and valuable customer experiences powered by a deep understanding of customer needs and motivations.

Many brands suffer from “two site” syndrome that results in a frustrating and fragmented customer experience. The operation of separate content and e-commerce silos force customers to jump between sections in the website during “explore” and “buy” phases.

Perfect omnichannel experiences are not just delivered seamlessly across all channels but are also consistently personalized for the individual consumer based on the user context, time, journey, browse history, situational and social data, and so forth.

Microservices have stirred a wave of change in enterprise efforts to achieve better service-software architectures, and digital leaders are rushing to capitalize on them for building great digital experiences.

Using microservice architecture, omnichannel APIs remove the complexities of underlying systems to help in building truly seamless and scalable front-end experiences. APIs play a critical role in digital business transformation by helping companies go to market quickly. And by creating custom APIs, some firms have established new ecosystems, scaled up, and disrupted an entire market.

But how did software architecture evolve from traditional, monolithic applications to flexible, decoupled modules?

With cyber attacks costing businesses between $400 and $500 billion a year, visibility into application, cloud, network, data center, and mobile risks has never been more critical. As cloud computing, mobility, big data, social technologies, and the Internet of Things are reshaping businesses, the risk of data breaches continues to rise at alarming rates. In 2015, 38% more security incidents were detected than the year before, according to a PwC report.

From the CISO and CIO perspective, security is paramount in an omnichannel scenario, while for CMOs and Line-of-Business leaders, omnichannel success calls for winning customers’ digital moments via superior customer experience, increasing number of payment methods, devices, and fulfillment options—all of which expands the attack surface and creates more risk than ever before.